Page 119 of Cruel Love

He’s holding up better than I would be, that’s for sure.

I kneel by the refrigerator, hooking my hands into the armpits of the man lying on the floor with two bullets through his eyes.

Lilah grabs his legs and braces herself. “One, two...”

We lift him up and begin carrying him out the way we came, blood spilling off his clothing onto the carpet. That’s gonna be hell to get out...

“Hey, Slappy.”

Boxcar glances up from his laptop as we pass by him.

“You gonna help or what?” Lilah asks him.

He laughs. “Y-no. You kill ‘em, you dump the bodies. This ain’t a you cook, I clean kind of deal, all right?”

I sigh, way too tired for this shit. “You two...”

Lilah drops the legs. “What are you even doing anyway?” she asks, ignoring me.

Boxcar exhales hard. “Well, to start, I burrowed into the security mainframe and replaced their tech with my tech. Now, even if someone tries to remote into it from somewhere off-site, they can’t. Then, I wired the outdoor systems to send me immediate alerts. If anything larger than a squirrel moves within one-hundred feet of our perimeter, my phone lights up like the Fourth of July, or... Bastille Day, given the current locale. Lastly, when Myra caught me, she yanked my connection which knocked all the indoor cameras offline. I’m currently trying to get them back on from the top floor down. However, that means eventually going downstairs which I’m not exactly looking forward to as it’s currently populated by that raven-haired psycho bitch.”

Lilah pauses and slowly raises a brow. “Not bad, Boxcar,” she says.

He blinks at the compliment. “Thank you...”

She bends over and grabs the dead man’s legs again, giving me a let’s go nod before tugging us both toward the back garden.

“Now, was that so hard?” I ask as soon as we’re outside.

“Was what so hard?”

“Treating Sparky like a human being.”

She scoffs. “He finally did something helpful. Whoop-di-doo.”

“He led us here,” I remind her. “He got you inside, putting himself at great personal risk—”

“Okay, fine. The kid’s not completely worthless.” We stop at the end of the line of bodies. “All right, drop him.”

I release the torso and the dead man clunks to the grass with the rest of them. “Well, that’s done.” I gesture toward the pile of tarps and sheets. “Let’s get them covered up. No respect in leaving them out like this.”

“Or...” Lilah slinks closer to me, “we can just skip that, go inside, and have hot sex in the shower while I rinse all this blood off.”

I furrow my brow. “Good god, woman...”

“What?”

“Of all the times to be insatiable.”

“Archer, if being surrounded by dead bodies kept me from having sex, I never would have lost my virginity.”

She starts back toward the house, wiping her dirty hands on her jeans as she goes.

“I wasn’t joking about that therapy,” I say. “It’ll be good for you!”

Lilah waves a passive hand at me without breaking her stride.

“And me...” I exhale to no one. “And our future children... which may not even happen.” I grab the tarp. “Hard to impregnate a woman if she lives on the other side of the world.”

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